August Doldrums

If you notice, I haven't written anything in three weeks, and that's because there hasn't been anything much to write about.

On a personal front, the major things going on is I'm facing partial unemployment -- my company just cut everyone's hours and salaries to 40%, and we go on employment for the rest, which means I'll be making about 70% of what I was before. This is doable, at least in the short term, provided I can ever actually get registered for the unemployment. I've already put about 5-1/2 hours into the process, but apparently I'm the one person out of the eight or nine at my company who are doing this (all the full-timers) who still isn't fully registered. Have I ever told you guys how much I hate the various branches and departments of our government. (At one point in the process, they transferred me to someone who was supposed to be a specialist for the program I'm going on, only to find myself talking to the New York State Police. The unemployment people have been transferring people to and giving out the wrong number!)

Last weekend was kind of weird, as my family headed upstate to celebrate my niece's birthday/high school graduation. It was the first time I've had the house to myself (with just the three cats) since pre-COVID days. It was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was delightful to be able to go to the bathroom any time I felt the urge without being doo-dee-dooed (our family's term for when you're just about to head into the bathroom, but somebody cuts you off and gets in there before you). It was also nice to be able to hit the bed for a nap without having to negotiate a room change with my wife. (She usually works out of the bedroom and I work out of the living room, so if I want to take a nap, she has to move her whole base of operations. More often than not these days, if I get hit with that sudden urge to sleep, I just drop off uncomfortably in my recliner rather than go through the whole room-exchange process.) But I also missed them, and after five months of togetherness, it was unusual to be home alone. I was worried I might have to fend off Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern.

I have been listening to a lot of music, especially stuff from 2020, as I work my way toward my 2020 Best-of-the-Year lists. I guess the most interesting albums I've heard lately were Auri by Auri, and Every Bad by Porridge Radio.

Auri is a side-project type band that includes Tuomas Holopainen and Troy Donockley from Nightwish and the Finnish vocalist Johanna Kurkela. The band is a little folkier and a little less grandiose than Nightwish, but retains many of the elements I like best about Nightwish's music. (Holopainen must be an interesting character. He seems to only love operatic female vocalists, but he also must be hard on them -- he's burnt through three of them over the course of nine Nightwish studio albums.) The Auri album is from 2018.

Porridge Radio (PR) is a British indie rock band from Brighton, UK with a sassy female vocalist. In some ways, they remind me of Florence + the Machine, except that vocalist Dana Margolin is less of a belt-out-it vocalist than Florence Welch - she talks as much as sings - and at least on this LP, PR is more consistent in their songwriting. (I've often described Florence + the Machine as being Annie Lennox in desperate need of a Dave Stewart.)

The only other musical thing I have to tell you about it is a recent live YouTube concert. Last weekend, with the fam away, I really had only three things on my calendar. I had a work meeting scheduled on Saturday morning (which is one of the reasons I didn't go upstate with the others); I had a televised UFC card on Saturday night (which my DVR didn't record for some reason, but to tell you the truth, I didn't really miss it); and for Friday night, I had an EP-Release Party by Mree, broadcast on YouTube.

Now Mree is actually Marie Hsiao, a young singer-songwriter from New Jersey. Her music falls somewhere between the genre's of indie-folk and dream pop. It's soft, with lovely, ethereal vocals. In 2019, her song "In the Kitchen" from the EP The Middle came in at #5 on my Top 20 Songs of 2019 list. She has a new EP out this year called The Bloom, which I really like. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about this concert.

One of the things that's been driven home to me time and again over the last decade or so since the closing of The Pisces Cafe was just how high the level of professionalism there was compared to some things I see from other parts of the country. A lot of the artists there were young, but I guess they watched and learned from the more experienced artists who performed there regularly, so that whatever level they were at as songwriters and musicians, their shows were at least generally run in a pretty crisp fashion.

I don't want to trash Mree. I think she's immensely talented, and as far as I can tell, she seems like a really pleasant young woman. But here's what happened.

First off, although the show was scheduled for a 9PM start, it was at least 9:12 or so before she came on the air. (It could have been later - I don't remember anymore.) I figured there must be technical difficulties going on, and I almost gave up on the show entirely when the dead screen finally came alive.

OK yay! Time for some music. Well...not so much. Mree still wasn't set up properly to start. Apparently she was trying to broadcast to Twitch and YouTube at the same time, and her video monitor was going back and forth between them and confusing the hell out of her.

Now I'm going to give her a little bit of a break here. These online concerts are still pretty new for most artists. A lot of them had never even tried such a thing prior to the COVID, so they - and the people who are trying to help broadcast them - are learning as they go. I haven't watched a lot of live shows on the Internet, but I've seen both Leslie Mendelson (and My Father's Place) and Blackmore's Night have problems with them. I guess the person who has done the best so far was Jeremy Gilchrist, and from what Denise tells me, he's got some other stuff going on right now and probably won't be on again anytime in the near future.

But the gist of the problem was this - for most of this show, Mree spent a ridiculous amount of time talking off the top of her head between songs and getting totally distracted by watching the chat rooms. When you could actually get her singing, the music was beautiful, but the delays, and the absent-minded chatter drove my poor little ADD brain berserk, to the point that I couldn't wait for the concert to be over. In all, it lasted about an hour-and-a-half from when I first tuned in until she played what she announced as her last song. She was going to stay on the air afterwards for a question-and-after session afterwards. And unless her audience talked her into going back on her word and playing more music at some point, it must have been a hell of a question-answer session - the show is up on YouTube now, and it's listed as being two hours and forty-two minutes long.

My point in all this isn't to bury Mree. I kind of hope she never reads this. (Of course you know how those things work out - witness the Wonderous Stories-Tommy debacle.) Or if she does read this, I hope she takes it to heart and realizes that what I'm really writing about how to not your fans crazy during live (or live broadcast) shows.

My point is to tell young artists to try to think about how things feel from your audience's point of view. People are there to hear the music. If you have an interesting story to tell about the song you're about to play, excellent. But if you take a ton of time between songs, and if you just talk off the top of your head, or chatter on because you're nervous, it's going to be a frustrating experience for those listening at home. If there's a chatroom going, great - get somebody else to run it for you, so you can concentrate on the music.

Having said all of that, let me just repeat that Mree's new EP is excellent, and if you at all like her style of music (she's very Enya-esque), pick it up, and give it a listen. Having heard her two most recent EP's, I'm definitely going to pick up some of her earlier albums and check them out. If you want to hear this concert, it's there on YouTube, but don't judge her by that - she is much, much better than you'll see her here.

That's about it for now. The only Sputnik Music contest I've been involved in lately is a '90s One-Hit-Wonder contest. So maybe I'll tell you about it once it has concluded.

Anyway, I have to pee something fierce, and Denise just doo-dee-dooed me again it. Dammit! I've got to go!

Favorite Artists, Part 10: About The Police

The late '60s and early '70s were truly a golden time for music. But change is inevitable, and somewhere around the mid-'70s, unbeknownst to me, a revolution was underway. (Well, actually it started even earlier than that, but the mid-'70s was when this new movement first started seeping into the public consciousness.)

Playing instruments. What's that? For some rebellious teens in England, it was all eff Yes, give us The Sex Pistols.

Punk got big quickly, but for the public at large, it was a short trend. Yes, after the artsy pretensions of bands like ELP and Rick Wakeman (and I love those guys, but they did go to excess sometimes), there was a (probably much-needed) movement towards simpler, rawer, more aggressive music.

But after a year or two, people started noticing, "Hey! Most of this sucks!" So rock evolved again, and bands with actual musicians started taking some of the better parts of punk rock (like the raw energy), and using them to create music that was more sophisticated. (I know, I'm oversimplifying here. But the gist of what I'm saying is true.)

One of the better bands that did this was The Police. They blended punk with reggae and even a little jazz to form a tasty brew that was all their own. They formed in London in 1977, and released their first album, Outlando's d'Amour, in 1978. I first heard them shortly thereafter on WNEW-FM, and I liked them right away. 

I'm sure the first Police song I heard was "Roxanne." It was something of phenomena - who can forget Eddie Murphy butchering it in his jail cell at the beginning of 48 Hrs.? And even though it's one of those songs that's been around so long I can't really hear it anymore (and I suspect neither can Sting), it is a great song. It's a classic story - boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl keeps on whoring around, literally "walk(ing) the streets for money," boy tries to sing her out of it.

But when I bought the LP, it was immediately apparent these guys were no one-hit wonders, as this first album also featured another pair of powerful singles, "Can't Stand Losing You," and "So Lonely."

The follow-up, Reggatta de Blanc (1979) was even better. "Message in a Bottle" was a huge hit in the U.S., and I liked it a lot, but the song that really grabbed me was "Walking on the Moon". I can remember laying in my bed in the dark, listening to this through headphones with closed eyes. By this time I was a young man of 22, floundering about, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, and the loneliness theme of both songs really hit me. And as an added treat, the LP also had a couple of other minor classics, "The Bed's Too Big Without You" and "Bring on the Night". In two albums, The Police had already put together a collection of singles that most bands would kill for. 

I also had a special love for the title track, "Reggatta de Blanc." It's one of those songs that doesn't have any real lyrics, just Sting singing something that sounds like "Dee-oh, dee-oh, dee-oy-oh." At the time, I was mad about Fantasy Baseball, and my team was called The Hughes Deodorants. And in my mind, this was the theme song that played when my beloved Deos ran out to take the field. (I think he's actually singing, "E-oh, E-oh", but what the hell.)

Let me say a few things about The Police's sound - Sting is a very distinct vocalist. His high-pitched voice isn't necessarily for everyone - in fact, it can get pretty strident in his upper range. But it can be very beautiful, and it's certainly a very expressive voice. And while I could take or leave the little jazz flourishes in their music (and that's even more true about Sting's later solo stuff), I loooooved that infusion of reggae. And let's face it, for a three-piece outfit, these guys had a pretty full sound - these boys could all play their instruments. Add that to some top-notch songwriting that included way-above-average lyrics, and what was not to love?

Many people consider their third album, Zenyatta Mondatta to be their worst album (to the extent that they had a worst album), but for years if you'd have asked me, I'd have said it was their best. It's only within the last two or three years I've been forced to admit that wasn't true. But more about that later. The band themselves were a little disappointed by it. One of the big hits off of this one, "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" is a pleasant but relatively vacuous little number about inarticulateness. (And you can see it was kind of a callback to "Reggatta de Blanc".) But the one that really hit me was "Don't Stand So Close to Me." It's a whole little movie in and of itself, an anxious yet sensual tale of forbidden love. You can almost feel the singer's longing. (Sting being a former teacher, I suspect there was a touch of the autobiographical in this one.)

There were a number of other tracks on this album that I also liked, even though none of them were released as singles. These included "Man in a Suitcase", "Canary in a Coalmine", "Voices Inside My Head", and "Bombs Away". And "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" also garnered a decent amount of airplay.

Ghost in the Machine (1981) was the one Police album I never fully warmed to, and I didn't buy a copy until years after it came out. In fairness, though, I seem to be in the minority about this, and there are certainly some gems here. These include "Spirits in the Material World" (and how many times did freaking Sting get to recycle that line about the umbrella?), "Secret Journey" and "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic".

I never really got either "Demolition Man" or "Invisible Sun", though.

Unfortunately, after this, the band got so big that tensions were inevitable. Sting took up acting, appearing in films like Brimstone and Treacle and that godawful David Lynch version of Dune. (I usually love David Lynch, but this film was hot garbage.) Andy Summers cut a really good album with King Crimson's Robert Fripp. Stewart Copeland wrote a very successful movie score for the film Rumble Fish. And the heads were getting too damned big to all fit in one band.

So what did they do on their inevitable way out the door as an ongoing project? The bastards put together what in retrospect I've come to realize was the best album of 1980's - 1983's Synchronicity.

Holy shit, is this an album! It's got singles ("Every Breath You Take", "Wrapped Around Your Finger", "King of Pain"), it's got depth (the two parts of "Synchronicity", especially "Synchronicity II". Yeah, I know that was also released as a single - leave me alone, I'm riffing here.) It's got underappreciated little gems ("Tea in the Sahara", "Murder By Numbers", "Miss Gradenko"). It's even got mania ("Mother"). I loved this LP from the beginning, and I think the only thing that really kept me from appreciating just how great it truly is for many years is that I was just so attached to Zenyatta Mondatta that I couldn't admit to myself that the band had made an even better album than that one.

So the boys went on tour, and by the time the tour was over, they were proclaimed the "The biggest rock band in the world" by many critics, a sentiment with which I agreed.

Sadly, they broke up after that.

It didn't happen right away. They went on hiatus. Sting made his first solo album. Summers made another album with Fripp. Copeland wrote another film score. In 1986, they tried to get back together to record a sixth album. But the only thing that came out of it was "Don't Stand So Close to Me '86", and by then, they were probably singing this each other. (Actually, Copeland broke his collarbone and couldn't play the drums. But the sentiment of the song was true - they pretty much couldn't stand being near one another any longer.)

And me, like an idiot, just assumed they'd always be around. So I never saw them live.

Andy Summers had a long career after that. He recorded a bunch of solo albums, the last in 2017. I have to admit, I've never listened to any of them, and I didn't listen to any prior to this write-up, because I didn't want to listen to stuff freaking forever, I wanted to start writing. I do love those two albums he made with Robert Fripp, though, especially the first one, I Advance Masked (1982).

Stewart Copeland has had probably an even more storied post-Police career than Summers. He's become known for writing the scores of for various films, television shows and video games. When my wife and I adopted our two children, one of the shows my daughter and I bonded over was Dead Like Me. It's about a young woman who is accidentally killed when the toilet from the disintegrating Mir space station crashes down on her during her lunch break on the first day of a temp job, and she becomes a grim reaper. I always liked the score from that show. It's one of Copeland's.

As for Sting, we all know what happened to him. He became a megastar, releasing a series of hit albums. I've mostly liked his solo work, except for some of the jazzier stuff or the songs where he lets his voice get all high and strident ("If you looooooove somebody, If you loooooooooooovvve someone, set them free!", or "If I ever loooooze my faith in you!")

He's written and recorded some truly beautiful ballads ("Fields of Gold", "When We Dance", "Shape of My Heart"), created some great jazzy little ditties ("Englishman in New York," "Fragile", "Moon Over Bourbon Street", "Seven Days"), and released some very Police-sounding anthems ("Fortress Around Your Heart," "The Russians", "We Work the Black Seam") .

He's also experimented with Arabic music ("Desert Rose") and country music ("I Hung My Head", "Fill Her Up"), recorded an album of 16th Century British folk music (Songs From the Labyrinth (2006)), recorded an album of old Christmas folk songs and madrigals (If on a Winter's Night ... (2009)), written and performed in a Broadway musical (The Last Ship (2014)) and gone back to his reggae roots with an LP on which he collaborated with the reggae singer Shaggy (44/876 (2018)). Not everything he's done has been a winner, but overall, he's had many more successes than failures. (And although it didn't have a long run on Broadway, Denise and I did get to catch The Last Ship before it closed. Yeah, the story was kind of dumb, but Sting's score was pretty sublime.)

When Denise and I first together, it soon became apparent that if Sting ever came a-callin', she'd be dumping my sorry butt in a hot minute. She not only loved his music, she loved him. She and I saw him live on a number of occasions, and at a variety of venues (including Jones Beach more than once). She used to get mad at me when I'd tell her that I thought Sting was kind of a jerk for not agreeing to a Police reunion to toss those other two guys a payday. But I meant it. Yeah, they were doing OK, but he was jetting around the world, saving the seals and all that. Why not give Summers and Copeland one last shot at some real buckos?

So in 2007, I finally got my wish. The Police reunited for one last tour, and Denise and I got to see them live at Jones Beach. (Even though unlike me, she was smart enough to have also seen them in their heyday.)  No, it wasn't the same as if I'd caught them on that Synchronicity tour, but it was still pretty great. Will The Police ever reunite again? Who cares, they're all geezed out now! Seriously, I don't really need for them to do it, but if they did, I'd certainly pay attention.

So that's my write-up about The Police. In the end, they only released five little studios albums, but they made them count. Summers and Copeland, and especially Sting, have all added to the legacy of the band with the things they've done since that original breakup. But in the end, as much as I like Sting's solo stuff, he wouldn't have made the My Favorite Artists list by himself. His work has been artful, often subtle, and far-reaching. But The Police as a band were far punchier, and for a time, they truly deserved the title of "The Biggest Rock Band in the World".

Next Up: I'm excited to start my listening soon in preparation for the next article in this series, which should be up in three months or so. I'm not telling you who it's about. (Pause). Ok, you twisted my arm. It's Blondie! See ya then.

July 2020 Song of the Day

Dammit, the Blogspot people have been effing around with the format on here, and now I can't find anything. What is it with web people that they can't resist mucking about with something that's perfectly fine? The front page looks so damned horsey now.

Well, nothing to be done. I'm sitting here listening to the new Joe Satriani album, so I'm going to keep myself chill, and hardly wish them leprosy or anything.

Anyway, here's this month's Song of the Day update. For new readers, this refers to the monthly Song of the Day list on the Sputnik Music website. Each month, one user hosts the list and names a theme. Everyone then recommends songs in line with this theme, and people rate the various song recommendations. The list of July songs can be found at Sputnik Music Song of the Day - July 2020.

1. The theme for the month was Songs From/About Your Home Town. 

2. There were obviously so many amazing choices to choose from, but I went with "Hero (I Don't Wanna Be)" from my old buddies This Island Earth. Sadly, many of my fellow Sput Users are a bit pop rock impaired, so it didn't score that highly with most of them. The feeling was mutual, as I didn't care for many of their picks either, so my average rating for the month was 2.79 (out of 5), one of my lowest scores ever. (That's what they get for hitting me with three hip-hop songs in one month.) This Island Earth - Hero (I Don't Wanna Be).

3. I had a two-way tie for my highest rating this month between two classics: "Blister in the Sun" by Violent Femmes, and "Welcome to the Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance. Violent Femmes - Blister in the Sun; My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the Black Parade.

4. However, the highest scoring song of the month (of which with Denise would most assuredly approve) was another classic, "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence.

5. In all, there were actually 32 recs for July, as the host for the month allowed a latecomer to add a bonus track to the end of the playlist. The link for the playlist for the month, minus the 3 songs that aren't up on YouTube, is July 2020 Song of the Day YouTube Playlist.

Anyway, hope you're all staying safe, and maybe even going back to work, as New York State is starting to open things up again. Also, I'm done with all my listening, so I hope to have that write-up about The Police done sometime this week (or maybe even tomorrow, depending on the workload from my job and my own level of laziness.) And no, we're NOT going to defund them, you sick so-and-so's. (What would Sting do without his private jet?)

Also, as an addendum, they've finally released the new Go-Go's documentary on Showtime (which I think is still free for most of you who have Optimum Cable during the Covid.) Denise and I watched it this morning, and if you're a fan (like we are - that was one of the shows the Covid made us miss out on this summer), I think you'll find it pretty enjoyable. Man, given their lifestyles, those five gals are damned lucky to still be alive.

That's all for now. As my son used to say when he was 10, while running rings around me in his racing video game, "Peace Out, Suckas!"